Force of Habit: Using Firefox Instead Google Chrome

 Yesterday was crazy with the launch of Google Chrome. Almost every acquaintance I knew had jumped into the “let’s try it out” bandwagon and were soon raving about Google’s new browser. As for me, I promised that I would be using Chrome at least for a couple of days but I find myself ditching it after a few hours.

Well, not that Chrome is a bad browser. The browser’s pretty straightforward and streamlined. The interface isn’t distracting at all. It displays web standard pages quite well. In fact, in terms of speed and reliability, Chrome does seem to trump Firefox and IE. I tried to open around 10+ tabs and most of them streaming videos and the damn thing just kept on. Do that with Firefox and you’re sure to crawl, crash even. Since Google claims that this is because Chrome treats each tab as a separate process, then we might just attribute that to my machine.

It’s got the famous “incognito window” or “p0rn mode” (supposedly to kick IE in the nuts) where you can surf without having to store cookies and history breadcrumbs locally. Though the paranoid in me refuses to believe that Google did this to uphold server-side privacy.

However, with it being in Beta, you can’t quite expect a fully-functional browser. As a web browsing tool for daily routine, sure it’s fast, it’s reliable, it’s great. A few quirks that I noticed were no ability to Shift + Enter in the address bar to create a .net suffix (and not even an option for .org too). There’s no RSS feed button for in-browser feed reading. While it imports pretty much all your browsing information from Firefox/IE, it doesn’t have a refined options list yet. I can’t even sort out the imported bookmarks! The address bar behaves like the not-so Awesome bar of Firefox 3 and worst of all, no add-ons (yet).

As a web power user, Chrome can’t still replace the functionalities that I get using Mozilla Firefox and my 20+ add-ons. Chrome looks really promising and probably if Google starts its own plug-in library to match Firefox’s I might make the jump. But for now, I am a creature of habit and am writing this within Firefox. Like all the entries that you read on this blog.